The album Stevie Nicks said took her years to figure out: “I didn’t even understand what it was”
Not every album is meant to be showered with the praise it deserves in the moment. Anyone can manage to capture the spirit of their times if they put enough trendy effects and buzzwords into their tunes, but it’s both a blessing a curse to be ahead of one’s time, with most people ridiculing you upon release and then either apologising after the fact or realising that they may have been off the mark in trashing your record. Although time has been kind to many of Fleetwood Mac’s projects, even Stevie Nicks could admit when she thought that some material was far below her usual standard.
When she first joined Fleetwood Mac, though, Nicks knew that there was absolutely no room for filler in her arsenal. She was going to be the superstar that she had waited to be her whole life, and the minute she and Lindsey Buckingham joined the group, all of the bluesy inflexions of Peter Green’s version of the group had been left in the dust in favour of pure pop masterpieces like ‘Rhiannon’.
And despite being timestamped as one of the greatest rock and roll albums of its time, the fact that Rumours sounds fantastic to this day is a miracle. The production crew truly outdid themselves when making the record, and while the band themselves were going through turmoil trying to hold onto their sanity and balance their internal relationships, rarely has heartache ever sounded so good on tracks like ‘Dreams’ or ‘Songbird’.
While a lot of that perfection came from them compromising, Tusk should have been the moment when Nicks could spread out a bit more. They finally had a double album to work with, and since she had been cheated out of having ‘Silver Springs’ on the last record, this would be the golden opportunity for her to show her stuff. So when she only got a handful of tunes on the record, it was a no-brainer for her to go solo, especially with some of the strange moments on the title track or ‘Not That Funny’.
Aside from everyone in the band thinking that Buckingham had gone crazy when working on some of his eccentric songs, Tusk has become a fan favourite throughout the years. It’s certainly bloated in some respects, but even Nicks admitted that she was learning new things about the record well after the fact.
Even though Nicks had a soft spot for tunes like ‘Sara’, she remembered not fully grasping the concept until years later, saying in 1986, “Everything on Tusk was very like ‘warrioresque’, which is probably one of the reasons why 13 months didn’t kill us all, because it was so…it’s like we kind of went to kind of another kind of world for Tusk and I think that [it’s] one of those records that some day people will sit down and listen to and understand what it really was because I didn’t even understand what it was and I think I’m only now, as I listen to it in my own private time, starting to realise that there was a lot more in Tusk that even I didn’t see.”
Then again, this should not be the first Fleetwood Mac experience that anyone should listen to. Rumours will always be the gold standard for a reason, and even some of heir later 1980s works like Tango in the Night are a lot better as a whole, but when talking about the experience of an album, Tusk has more in common with something more artsy, like the band making their own warped version of The Beatles’ White Album.
Not everything was going to go exactly as planned, but their ability to work off each other and be willing to get weird is almost a rite of passage for artists at some point. It’s never easy, but that kind of fearlessness in recording can sometimes give way to the best music anyone has ever heard.
